Courage and cowardice

I feel I need to say out loud what I am not hearing said regarding the gang rape of a woman in a frat house at Cornell University. All 57 men who were involved in some way are cowards. The administration who swept it under the rug are cowards. The national governing body of the fraternity (from whom I've seen nothing at all) are cowards. They were all so afraid of drawing attention to themselves by doing what was right that they instead did nothing at all except pretend it wasn't happening. 

Do you want to know who are not cowards? Any woman who reports a sexual assault. She knows exactly what she is in for. These woman are not treated kindly by the system. It takes guts to do what is right even though you know that it will exacerbate the pain of the original assault. 

In my opinion, all 57 men who either participated or stood by need to be charged and prosecuted. At a minimum, all members of the administration who covered it up need to be fired without their golden parachutes, but I think you could make a case for charging them with aiding and abetting criminals. And all fraternities on that campus (the less generous part of me says all campuses) need to be closed. We need to make silence even more uncomfortable than doing the right thing. Had we taken women seriously decades ago, there would be a significant amount of men who are destroying our country who would never have had the chance to do so. It seems a pretty easy argument to say that if women had been valued then no one would have to be living in this country's current hell scape now. For anyone who ever covered up for a boy "just being a boy" you are complicit in our current state of affairs regardless of who you voted for. 

Oh, and for the record, bears don't invite fifty of their friends to join them in sexual assault.